We imagine what could be and so we see what would be. That is why the imagination constructs reality and reality is added to and magnified by the imagination.

If each of the letters composing the words of this Editorial had their own colour, these pages would catch our eye in a very different way from that of the text you are now reading.

The writer Vladimir Nabokov had a neurological capacity known as ‘grapheme- ‑colour synaesthesia’ which meant that when he looked at letters and numbers he saw them in colour. This sensory ability provided him with another way of seeing the act of seeing and of seeing the world.

The author of Lolita and Pale Fire alludes to his visual ability in several texts and makes use of the narrative of this sensory experience, combining it with his imaginative power for creating metaphors to speak of desire, of how it varies in intensity and oscillates, its contradictions and unruliness.

Not infrequently, he makes use of ekphrasis (‘description’ from the Greek έκ φράσις), the long established rhetorical device whereby the description of an image vividly evokes that image, just as, in the Iliad, the description of Achilles’ shield renders that memorable shield visible. Researchers in the neurosciences and psychology have looked with interest at the texts where Nabokov deals with his form of synaesthesia, seeking to reach a better understanding of this unusual and seductive phenomenon.

In the century prior to Nabokov, at a time when the turning hands of clocks accelerated the regular movement of time itself, and in a world where the doors of perception were opening little by little, and their creaking hinges could be heard with a clarity that elicited anxiety and promise, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, dissatisfied with the jarring lack of the invisible within the visible, presented the poetry that issued from his imagination, both cool and ardent, lucid and hallucinatory, as a perilous gift to humanity of new times, new worlds and new words to speak to them all.

The poetry of Rimbaud was written between the ages of fifteen and twenty, with miraculous verbal inventiveness, daringly adopting the posture of a medium (‘Letter of the Seer’); both these facets were then, and remain today, wilfully inexplicable.

This exquisite poetry and insolent abandon which soon brought his writing to an end caused him to appear with the radiant surprise of a magnificent lightning flash, in whose blue glow we see the outrage felt by a civilisation which negates life and liberty with unacceptable ferocity.

The life and work of this great (unwilling) master of modern poetry, precursor of surrealism, the beatniks, and even of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Guy Debord, are therefore an unending and violent denunciation of captivity, an angry manifesto for the transformation of life and an imperious intimation of freedom, freely lived.

In the writings-speech of the poet-cum-seer, which is what he wanted a poet to be, the colours and the letters which enunciate them, or the letters and colours which represent them, are the two sides of the coin with which he pays to augment the little of reality that exists in reality and to confer on truth a little more truth than it customarily possesses.

In ‘Vowels’, his famous sonnet in alexandrines, the letters and colours dance their strange and troubled ballet of meanings and images:

In this poem, as in Nabokov’s vision, there is a kind of inversion of direction and meaning. Instead of it being the letters which form the words, naming the colours, it is the colours that name the letters, colouring them, marking them, identifying them and announcing them.

In his essay ‘Sounds and Colours’, in which he speaks of Rimbaud’s memorable sonnet, the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes use of phonetic subtleties to shed light on the poet’s restless play with words.

This essay is contained in the book Look, Listen, Read, in which the founder of Structural Anthropology applies a concealed or indirect expertise to decipher some of the laws that govern our aesthetic judgments and which point, on the map of the world’s knowledge, to the place of art.

In an attempt to scrutinise an age abounding in synaesthesias (Charles Baudelaire had pioneered these, and their correspondences), this essay also cites the writer Théophile Gautier, an older contemporary of Rimbaud, when he said: ‘I heard the noise of colours. Green, red and yellow sounds reached me in perfectly distinct waves.’

In the early twentieth century, it is the suicidal poet, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, friend, confidant and accomplice of Fernando Pessoa and fellow-editor of Orpheu, to whom we owe the poem ‘Álcool’ [Alcohol], including these lines:

The author of Dispersão [Dispersion] also wrote the poem ‘Quase’ [Almost], the first stanza of which tells us:

The little more blue that Sá-Carneiro failed to conquer was what would have provided him with what he needed in order to be that which – because he was lesser – he was not. This gave him the reason he needed to end his own life so that he could achieve in death that beyond which the falling short of life denied him. That is why Pessoa found in a precept of ancient wisdom the mysterious words that he submitted, as a pained and grief-filled tribute to the memory of the great friend he had lost, for them to convey him to us, in the human shadow of a divine light: ‘Those whom the gods love die young...’

‘Black A, white E, red I…’ ‘Yellow twilights spin about me…’ ‘A little more blue – I would be beyond…’ So many colours spoken by words that seek them and seek themselves within them, in unending play that moves to and fro from the verbal to the visual, and back again.

But what actually is colour? What are colours like? How do we see colours? These questions have been present in our culture from the outset and people have long sought to answer them, giving rise to some magnificent theories and works. From the pre-Socratics to the system of colours devised by Plato and the treatise De Coloribus, attributed to Aristotle, from Les Météores, by René Descartes, to Spinoza’s Treatise on the Rainbow, from Isaac Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of […] Colours of Light to J. W. von Goethe’s Theory of Colours, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colours to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and photoelectric effect, from Michel Eugène Chevreul’s On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours, which influenced the impressionists, to the theory of colour constancy of Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera – observation, experimentation, imagination, speculation, theorising on this topic and others close to it have led human thinking to move forward, despite hesitations, oscillations and contradictions, in its knowledge of optics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, architecture, ethnography, sociology, historiography, archaeology, aesthetics, literature, the arts, cinema, heraldry, astrology and alchemy, all as relates to colour.

Modern and contemporary artists, along with designers and architects, were eager to grapple with the topic, creating original and varied ways of thinking about colour: Delaunay, Malevich, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Magritte, Klee, Albers, Le Corbusier, Wada, Itten…

Since antiquity, in successive ages, especially the Renaissance (Flemish and Italian), artists have concocted pigments, producing paints and creating colours, using them to advantage and with originality in their work. The results of these and other technical advances have been applied in painting, contributing to change, renewal and breakthroughs. It should be recalled that the Greek word τέχνη refers to knowledge that comes from experience and which can be signified by words such as technique, art and craft.

In successive ages and in the colours with which artists gave them colour, there are the heavenly blues of Giotto, the blues of the background in the portrait of the doge and of the Virgin’s cloak in Giovanni Bellini, the incandescent blue that floods everything and is named after Yves Klein and the masculine blue of Mário Cesariny. Only recently, it was reported that researchers have solved the mystery of Pollock’s manganese blue.

There is the sumptuous green of Paolo Veronese, the vegetable green of Henri Matisse and the watery green of Olafur Ealiasson. There is Ruben’s carnal red, Joan Miró’s Spanish red and Piet Mondrian’s geometric red. There is Andrea Mantegna’s stony brown, Titian’s silky brown, the dense brown of Rembrandt and the earthy brown of João Hogan.

There is Vermeer’s yellow (the ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ of which Proust writes), van Gogh’s sun-filled yellow, Pierre Bonnard’s timid yellow, the feminine yellow of Picasso and the graphic yellow of Roy Lichtenstein. There is Hokusai’s maritime grey, James Whistler’s autobiographical grey and the grey of his sister’s glove painted by Columbano.

There is El Greco’s aristocratic black, Goya’s haunted black, the calligraphic black of Pierre Soulages and the anxious black of Fernando Calhau. There is Rogier van der Weyden’s pious white, Kazimir Malevich’s white on white and the serial white of Robert Ryman.

In cinema, we can see the classic Technicolor of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, or of Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, a process that marked an era with its vibrant and dream-like saturation. There is Tarkovsky’s earthy palette and the pastel palettes of Wes Anderson, the Baroque reds of Almodóvar and Jarman’s deep blue. There is the harsh, grainy light of Claire Denis, the chiaro-escuro of Pedro Costa and the cold, urban contrasts of Michael Mann. Writers have already noted that the switch from warm yellow street lighting to the colder LED technology has changed the aesthetic of films set at night, affecting colour and the way the camera captures the light.

The great couturier Yves Saint Laurent spent his life looking at colours and made colours and colour combinations one of the finest features of his art and his style. He liked to remark that there is no colour which does not go with another colour. But particular shades of one colour may not go with a shade of another.

The inimitable Coco Chanel said on the subject: ‘I love colour. As long as it’s black.’ And: ‘When I find a colour darker than black, I’ll start to use it. But until then, I’ll use black.’ But she also said: ‘The most beautiful colour in the world is the one that suits you.’

Colours are a powerful and suggestive language found in many varied languages (even in the language of sounds). Colours are primary, secondary or tertiary, analogous, complementary or opposing, warm or cool, bright or dull.

Colours are natural and artificial, opaque and transparent, discreet and indiscreet, analogue and digital, individual and collective, local and universal, objective and subjective, real and imaginary, visible and invisible, profane and religious, civil and military, utopian and dystopian, nationalist and internationalist, clean and dirty, bright and dark, dry and moist, quiet and loud, in fashion and out. And around some of these colours and their gradations, kitsch prowls, like a hungry beast.

Colours create, invent, identify, distinguish, signal, symbolise, solemnise, sacralise (they are fundamental to liturgical seasons and acts), confer nobility (flags, standards, coats of arms), profane, informalise, desacralise. Colours embellish, deface, fatten, slim, highlight, disguise, include, exclude, unite, divide, inform, communicate, advertise, illustrate, warn, distract, glorify.

Colours convey voices and silences, safety and peril, proximity and distance, prestige and dishonour, joy and sadness, serenity and violence, triumph and defeat, health and sickness, virtue and sin, professions and leisure, grief and eroticism, peace and war.

Colours speak the truth and lie, show and conceal, attract and repel, light and put out fire, They are nature and culture, naturalness and technology, reality and dream, matter and form, being and becoming, monotony and variation. They are code, signal, image, mirage, allegory, metaphor, metonym, spectacle (stage, costume and lighting design).

The history of colours pervades universal history. This means that it plays a part in many other histories, which it helps to shape: the history of the arts, of the sciences, of politics, of the law, of religions, of institutions, of societies, of international relations, of labour, of leisure, of food, of clothing, of sport, of the military.

This topic has been abundantly explored, with unusual insight, originality and tenacity, by the great historian of colours, Michael Pastoureau, who did us the honour of agreeing to be interviewed for this edition of Electra, setting the highest of standards for our dossier section. During the black years (black was the colour of the dictatorship in Portugal), Jorge de Sena wrote this courageous poem entitled ‘A Cor da Liberdade’ [The Colour of Freedom]:

After the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which instituted democracy in Portugal, Sena wrote a continuation of this poem, which he entitled ‘April Song’. He takes his lead from the colours of the Portuguese flag:

In the poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, a ‘labour of patience’ executed with ‘firm perseverance’, colours are markers of nature and culture. In the poem ‘Arco-da-‑Aliança’ [Rainbow Covenant], the poet sings:

And in his poem ‘Homenagem a Mark Rothko’ [Tribute to Mark Rothko], Andrade wrote:

In a lecture on ‘Blindness’, Jorge Luis Borges spoke of the colours he saw and those he did not. When his voice became clearer, he said:

What colour is our age? Is it the black of fear? Or the gold of money? Is it the green of ecology? Or is it the mirror-colour or narcissism? Is it the colourless colour of stupidity? Or the tearaway colour of speed? Or the digital colour the post-work era? Or the fixed colour of attention? Is it the many-coloured colour of food or the flesh colour of the body? Surprisingly, the Pantone Color Institute announced that the Color of the Year 2026 would be Cloud Dancer: a bright, billowy and serene shade of white.

Of course, to assign a colour to a word-topic is an exercise in which subjectivity seeks its own objectification, often unsuccessfully. It is clear that the outcome of this colour-naming operation depends on where and when, on maps and calendars. What works today did not work yesterday and will not tomorrow. What works here will not work there, let alone further afield. Every colour has its geography, its chronology, its physics and its metaphysics. There are colours which are more stable in what they signify and represent and others which are more unstable and likely to shift.

Even so, it is helpful to ask again: what colour is our age? From the answer that each of us gives to this question we can perceive a sensibility, a perception and even a conception. These and other related topics form the subject matter of this issue, Electra 31, in which we hear from leading writers who have explored colour, colours and the questions they raise.

In her will, discovered after her death in among her papers, the great painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva assigns to colours the words that make them into a poem. By entrusting this to the friends whom she addresses, she seeks to transmit to them the visible and hidden powers of those colours.

In doing this, the ingenious painter of riddles conferred on colours the magical power of messengers bearing a message whose value will endure beyond her lifetime. Her will reads:

In this edition of Electra, the first of the new year, devoted to colours, we take the will of Vieira da Silva, that visionary of the visible, and offer it to our readers. Our hope is that, in reading the will and our magazine, they discover that sense of duration that the dense depth and earthy slowness of burnt sienna confer on those who look with a real desire to see. As if each of the letters in our words had its own colour and a vote.